Ao no Exorcist Half Season Review

[Announcement: BTW, I wrote this. It’s only natural that this post would follow this, too…]

Ao no Exorcist is about the Blue Exorcist, an Na’vi Exorcist from Pandora. He comes to Green Earth to Exorcize, except to fit in with the Tan Humans, the Blue Exorcist must assume an unassuming disguise…

Also, that picture has nothing to do with anything.

Okumura Rin is just a normal guy living with his twin brother, Okumura Yukio, and foster father, Father Fujimoto.

One day, he finds out that he (and Yukio) are the sons of Satan. Turns out Fujimoto was resisting Satan’s attempts to possess his body (apparently he was the strongest Exorcist in the world) through sheer willpower, but when Rin gets upset and says some mean words, his willpower falters, allowing Satan to kill Fujimoto.

Rin decides to call Fujimoto’s best friend, Mephisto Pheles, to help guide him. Mephisto is the chairman of the True Cross Academy, where they (secretly) train people to become Exorcists. Rin begs Mephisto to help him become an Exorcist, and is enrolled in the academy.

Now some terminology; an Exorcist is a person who fights demons. At True Cross Academy, apparently there are ‘normal’ and ‘special’ classes – not everyone there is an Exorcist, or even know demons exist (to see demons, you must first be wounded by one, and since most demons have no reason to wound random strangers…). Most of the non-Exorcist students are just rich spoiled brats.

But wait, why are there demons in the human world? There’s an alternate universe connected to the human one – Gehenna is where all of the demons lived, which is connected to Assiah, where we live. Most people are not even aware of this connection.

Though twins, Rin received all of Satan’s powers, while Yukio didn’t receive any. Thus, for some reason or another, Yukio started Exorcist training at the age of seven – allowing him to actually /teach/ one of Rin’s classes.

Rin’s primary form of attack is with a sword that ‘seals his inner demon’ (remind you of something?). Unsheathing it would cause him to gradually transform into a demon and never transform back, but he opens it like every day anyway. Whatever, I guess.

Of course, there are secondary characters. Moriyama Shiemi was this person who became possessed by a garden spirit, and later enrolled in the Exorcist program at True Cross along with Rin and Yukio.

Ryuji Suguro is another person, who understands the importance of feud in foodal battles. 16 years ago (perhaps this was Satan trying to make Rin and Yukio’s, who are 15, mom pregnant), Satan possessed the bodies of many of the strongest exorcists, causing math deaths and laughter. Mass deaths and slaughter. This destroyed Suguro’s temple, and he vows to do four things in life – Kill Satan; Rebuild his Temple; Beat Rin in Everything; and Eventually Dye his Hair in Pink, Brown, Purple, and Cashew at the Same Time with Many Capital Letters On Top.

The end.

Please, someone answer at least one of these questions:
– How does Rin wear pants with that tail, and where does it come out of? Does it have nerves? How does he control it?
– Why does Shiemi not get a school uniform?
– Why is Reverend William of Auvergne a real person?
– Why is holiness and anti-demon crap always to do with Christianity? What about Buddhism or Islam? Are there no demons in those religions? Or is it that Christians fight Satan, Muslims fight Shai’tan, Atheists fight God, and PETA fights PETA (people eating tasty animals)?
– Japan’s Christian population is tiny. Why do the Exorcists learn from the Old Testament? Where do they get the money to afford $120 lunches a day?
– In fact, if Rin and Yukio are so poor, why do they get an entire dorm to themselves? And shouldn’t the ingredients for cooking cost a lot more than a mass-produced meal?
– If ‘holy’ guns and ‘holy’ hand grenades can harm demons, WHY DON’T THEY JUST MAKE A HOLY GIANT NUCLEAR BOMB
– And finally, most importantly; how do those three girls fit into that one pot? It’s like they’re TWO-DIMENSIONAL or something.

I Report Tihs as pretty awesome.

Even though I could see some of the jokes from kilometres away, they were still pretty funny – Episode 6’s endings (there were three; episode 6 was like three episodes squished together, I guess) seriously made me crack up.

On the note of episode 6, is it a trend to see shounen mains be good at cooking now, for some reason? I remember old manga used to have the main just be a really manly guy who fought a lot, but now we’re increasingly seeing more mains good at ‘feminine’ tasks. I’m sure you guys can name right off the bat five of those types of characters (I can’t, though, but that’s me).

It’s also not common to own those types of things for a shounen main to let his common sense overrule his pride – it’s normal in everyday life, but in manga, we always have that person going ‘WHAT? ALRIGHT, I CAN JUMP OFF A HIGHER CLIFF THAN YOU AND STILL SURVIVE! LET’S DO IT’. After all, pride is a sin, right (my school is sinful)…

Rin seems much more of a ‘connectable’ character – even compared to those VN adaptations’ (urgh) bland otamots (who are made so that you can ‘feel’ what they are ‘feeling’, heh heh heh), one can much more easily connect to Rin’s experiences. Not that ‘oh, I remember the first time I saved my possessed father from Hell by slicing Satan’s gate in half!’, but ‘oh, I remember saying something real bad to my dad and then he died in a car accident.’, or even ‘oh, I remember saying something bad to my dad and now he’s had a not-so-rad fad of sad lads in a salad.’

I guess I may have went a bit overboard with my pictures, but oh well.

I don’t get why he has to fight every single episode, even in the fillers – I understand the story-by-story approach to build character, but can’t a shownen shou build character /without/ fights (or at least, violence)? Maybe, like, have him realize that studying is good for him? Perhaps the pace would not feel good (similar to a badly-placed flashback episode, cough cough hotd4 cough), but at least there’d be more variety.

Not that there’s not enough variety in the episodes – I love how everything changes from episode to episode, so the fighting is always different, and the non-fighting is also always different.

Finally, two last things.

What’s with otamots and drastic measures? Like, doing something so stupidly risky that nobody knows whether or not it would work. It’s been happening for almost every episode – cutting the Gehenna Gate, betting that Yukio wouldn’t shoot Rin, shooting Shiemi with a ‘nutrition capsule’ or whatever, hugging the frog, and not resorting to violence against Ukobach. I suppose, if you’re watching this week-by-week, the climax is worth waiting for so long – but for some person who’s watching this all on a marathon, I’m not sure they’d appreciate all the.. excitement.

What’s with manga and cracks in hearts? Like, it’s in every story as the stupidest plot device of all time. I’ll bet it’s like the longest article on TVTropes if somebody would search it for me, cough cough. I really hope somebody thinks of something original (maybe, like, demons possess your body by… arbitrarily numbering every human off and using a giant set of 6,200,000 60-sided dice to determine the first 25,720 numbers of a sequence, which would then be put into mathematical terms, and the demons again rolling 2,300,000,000,000 60-sided dice to determine the number (modulo 197,500,000,000) in the mathematical sequence, and then possessing that human’s body).

9 responses

How does Rin wear pants with that tail, and where does it come out of? Does it have nerves? How does he control it?
-He hides it under his shirt by wrapping it around his stomach. Since most boys his age wear their pants fairly loose, this doesn’t seem to be overly uncomfortable for him. It likely does have nerves, and one can only assume he controls it the way a monkey or Saiyan does.

Why does Shiemi not get a school uniform?
-She was recently enrolled and likely hasn’t had time to order one. Either that or she doesn’t know how to wear it, but LOL, what are the chances of that…

Why is Reverend William of Auvergne a real person?
-Because referencing real people is neat.

Why is holiness and anti-demon crap always to do with Christianity? What about Buddhism or Islam? Are there no demons in those religions? Or is it that Christians fight Satan, Muslims fight Shai’tan, Atheists fight God, and PETA fights PETA (people eating tasty animals)?
-This series seems to do a much better job of blending the various religions together than some, but I’m guessing its because the Vatican is the largest and most powerful religious stronghold to date, so its the first choice for main headquarters in a series where the good guys are exorcists who fight demons.

Japan’s Christian population is tiny. Why do the Exorcists learn from the Old Testament? Where do they get the money to afford $120 lunches a day?
-Because the bible is always way cooler in fiction than in real life. As for the food, True Cross academy is apparently mostly for rich people, so there.

In fact, if Rin and Yukio are so poor, why do they get an entire dorm to themselves? And shouldn’t the ingredients for cooking cost a lot more than a mass-produced meal?
-Because the school’s chairman says so, and the cooking episode was so busy being a filler it couldn’t be bothered to pay attention to the price of home-cooked meals verses mass produced ones.

If ‘holy’ guns and ‘holy’ hand grenades can harm demons, WHY DON’T THEY JUST MAKE A HOLY GIANT NUCLEAR BOMB.
-Where on earth would they get enough silver and holy water to make something like that?!

And finally, most importantly; how do those three girls fit into that one pot? It’s like they’re TWO-DIMENSIONAL or something.
-Nay! They’d have to be no larger than one single dimension in order to fit into a pot like that!

WHAT THE HELL IS HOLY WATER AND HOW DO YOU MAKE IT.
-Holy water is clean, ordinary non-salt water which becomes holy after being sanctified by a priest. It’s most often used for the blessing of people and objects and for repelling evil.